Dateline

"CBS Evening News" distinguished itself among the Big Three networks on Monday by devoting an entire segment to the ongoing controversy over the "Fast and Furious" program, where the federal government smuggled guns to Mexican drug cartels. NBC hasn't mentioned the story on its news programs since April 17, while the last time ABC covered it was a news brief on June 15.

Correspondent Sharyl Attkisson reported that "new documents obtained by CBS News show Attorney General Eric Holder was sent briefings on the controversial 'Fast and Furious' operation as far back as July 2010. That directly contradicts his [May 3, 2011] statement to Congress." After playing a sound bite from Holder's testimony, Attkisson continued that "at least ten months before that hearing, Holder began receiving frequent memos discussing 'Fast and Furious.' They came from...Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer."

Monday's NBC Today featured another preview of the upcoming Dateline interview with Dick Cheney about his new memoir, with correspondent Jamie Gangel declaring the former Vice President to be "A conservative hero to his fans, Darth Vader to his critics." [Audio available here]

On Thursday, Gangel also appeared on the NBC morning show to promote the interview, with co-host Ann Curry proclaiming Cheney to be "one of the most controversial figures of our time."

On Monday, fellow co-host Matt Lauer kept up that theme as he announced: "Former Vice President Dick Cheney speaks out about his controversial new memoir....looks back on his controversial time in the White House. In an exclusive interview he pulls no punches, makes no apologies. No one's spared, from Colin Powell to Condoleezza Rice."

Thursday's NBC Today previewed an upcoming Dateline interview with Dick Cheney about his new memoir and labeled the former Vice President "controversial" three times in less than a minute. Co-host Ann Curry proclaimed him to be "one of the most controversial figures of our time." [Audio available here]

Turning to correspondent Jamie Gangel, who conducted the interview, Curry noted: "I understand that you asked the former Vice President, in a wide-ranging conversation, about one of the biggest controversies of his time in office and that's the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques?"

Gangel described how Cheney's book was "filled with revelations and he does not back down on those controversial programs he championed that made him such a lightning rod for criticism after 9/11."

You can tell the liberals are really sweating the politics of the debt-limit talks when NBC puts on a special “Dateline NBC” devoted to politics. This is normally a time slot devoted to “news” topics like Casey Anthony or Lindsey Lohan. But last week, viewers were “treated” to anchorman Brian Williams actually covering a real news topic. It’s just too bad he forgot he was supposed to be a reporter, not an editorialist, spinning furiously against conservatives trying to rein in Obama’s incredibly reckless flood of new spending.

The last time Brian Williams showed up in prime time for a splashy special on public policy was an enormous tribute to the new president, Barack Obama -- making a run for hamburgers with him, hailing how he displayed apples everywhere, and bowing to him and wishing him a pleasant evening after NBC chronicled his glorious day of saving America from recession. You know, just like Williams treated Bush.

Two network anchors, 24 hours apart, cued up House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to despair from the left how the debt ceiling deal, presumably because of some future potential slight reductions in the projected rate of spending increases, will “hurt real people” as NBC’s Brian Williams asked her to confirm her “fear” that “the poor are gonna get hurt and the rich are gonna get by without harm.”

On Monday’s World News, ABC’s Diane Sawyer inquired (video below): “You think this is really going to hurt real people?”

The NBC News Investigative Unit has devoted considerable resources to uncovering "scandals" ranging from Marcus Bachmann's health clinic to Newt Gingrich's credit line at Tiffany to the Sarah Palin document dump, but continues to ignore a botched Justice Department operation that contributed to the death of a U.S. border agent.

Examining the trove of reports filed by NBC News national investigative correspondent Michael Isikoff over the last few months reveals a fixation on investigations involving Republican politicians and an aversion to probes concerning the Obama administration, even as other media outlets expose the controversial ATF practice of letting guns purchased in America slip across the U.S.-Mexico border in hopes the trail would lead federal agents to drug kingpins.

If they ever take a break from publicizing Charlie Sheen’s cocaine dos and dont's, or detailing the power politics within his Beverly Hills harem, the networks should grab a copy of the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics. And they may want to pay special attention to this entry: “Show good taste. Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity.”

From Feb. 1 through March 6, the three networks distinguished themselves by devoting 20 times more broadcast time to Charlie Sheen’s porn stars and drug issues than to the Planned Parenthood video scandal and the subsequent vote in the House of Representatives to defund the organization.

(Video below the fold)

Liberal pastor and civil rights leader Joseph Lowery’s strange benediction prayer hoping that one day "white will embrace what is right" wasn’t ignored on the Tuesday night news, but it wasn’t portrayed as at all controversial. CBS skipped over it. But ABC, NBC, and PBS’s NewsHour all featured it, often without interrupting their gauzy promotional tone. Here’s a brief tour of how it unfolded.

ABC: In the first half-hour of a 60-minute World News, Charles Gibson recalled a legend praying:

GIBSON: The Reverend Joseph E Lowery, the legendary civil rights leader, delivered the benediction.

Rev. JOSEPH LOWERY: We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man and white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.

GIBSON: As hundreds of thousands on the Mall savored what they had just seen.

Rick Warren had a surprisingly candid response to Ann Curry's question as to whether he would change his views on homosexuality if it were established that people are born gay.  The pastor of the Saddleback Church, explaining why such a finding wouldn't cause him to change his position, observed that he is inclined to want to have sex with every beautiful woman he sees, but that that doesn't make it right.

Curry interviewed Warren for a Dateline segment that will be aired tonight on NBC.  As noteworthy as Warren's candor was Curry's ostentatious display of righteous liberal anger, captured in the screengrab, while asking Warren whether he is homophobic.

View video here.

On PBS's Web site today, ombudsman Michael Getler writes of complaints over an incident during last Sunday's pledge drive.  He describes the cheap shot taken by actor Mike Farrell against vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin:

According to Joseph Campbell, vice president of fundraising programs, here's what happened:

On The Situation Room today, CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer made a surprising admission to, of all people, real estate entrepreneur Donald Trump:

BLITZER: What do you think of his (Obama's) decision to pick Joe Biden as his running mate?

TRUMP: I really don't know Senator Biden but I know one thing. He's run a number of times for president. He's gotten less than 1 percent of the vote each time. And that's a pretty tough thing. You know, he's also been involved in pretty big controversy like plagiarism in college and various other things. That's a pretty big statement. So perhaps you change over a period of time. But when you plagiarize, that's a very bad statement. That hasn't been brought up yet, but I'm sure at some point it will. I'm sure that Sarah Palin will bring it up in a debate or somebody's going to bring it up.

BLITZER: Are you talking about plagiarism when he was running for president?

TRUMP: No, I'm talking about when he was a college student as I understand it, and this was a big issue originally but he supposedly plagiarized as a college student. That's a pretty serious charge.

BLITZER: I don't remember that. We'll check it out. But maybe you obviously have a better memory about that.

 On CNN's American Morning today, White House correspondent Suzanne Malveaux reported on Barack Obama's campaigning in Virginia.  Afterwards, anchor Kiran Chetry had a question:

CHETRY: All right. And Suzanne, what's on tap for the campaign today? And please tell me it's not lipstick again.

MALVEAUX: Let's hope not. He's going to be in Norfolk, Virginia. That is in southeast Virginia, and it's home to the world's largest Naval base. It's one of the most competitive areas that the Democrats and Republicans are fighting over. It's a critical piece of property, piece of land there with folks in Virginia, and they want those voters.

George Ou reports that Dateline NBC investigative "journalist" Michelle Madigan was run out on a rail when she tried to infiltrate DEFCON in Las Vegas, the convention for hackers and security specialists, hoping to catch someone admitting to a crime. This is the same group of people who play "spot the spook" at their yearly conventions, so Michelle never had a chance. This all came after DEFCON organizers gave her four chances to register as press. Instead, Madigan made reference to how "people in Kansas" would be interested in what the hackers were up to (Kansas being the reference to the fly-over area between LA and NY) and then made a trip to the restroom to get her pinhole camera running.

Blogger Michelle Malkin has an excellent item today at RealClearPolitics.com about how the media have a lack of interest in stories about Christian missionaries kidnapped, brutalized, and tortured at the hands of Islamist terrorists. Here's an excerpt, after which I share my thoughts on what we could expect to see from the biased media should some of the South Korean missionaries make it back alive and find themselves interviewed on say "Dateline NBC":

The blood of innocent Christian missionaries spills on Afghan sands. The world watches and yawns. The United Nations offers nothing more than a formal expression of "concern." Where is the global uproar over the human rights abuses unfolding before our eyes?

Okay, I don't really get this, but apparently Stone Phillips, the just-laid-off "Dateline NBC" anchor, tops the list at "Google Trends" today.

You don't believe me?! I thought you wouldn't. See screencaps below the fold. By comparison, the late Jerry Falwell, whose funeral was today, came in at only #10.

Keep in mind the trend doesn't mean Phillips is the hottest search on the Web, just the "fastest-rising." According to Google:

With Hot Trends, you can see a snapshot of what's on the public's collective mind by viewing the fastest-rising searches for different points of time. You can see a list of the current top 100 fastest rising search queries in the U.S.

The press releases of the Discovery Channel boast that its parent company, Discovery Communications, is the “number one nonfiction media company.” That identifier is now in shambles, and the paper it’s printed on fit only to be crumpled and thrown away. The folks at Discovery have rendered themselves carnival barkers peddling sensationalistic garbage, trashy money-making gimmicks dressed up as real journalism.

The Discovery Channel is hyping to the heavens its new documentary on “The Lost Tomb of Jesus.” James Cameron, the Oscar-winning director of “Titanic,” has joined filmmaker Simcha Jacobovici in publicizing claims that a 2,000-year-old tomb containing 10 boxes of bones belonged to the family of Jesus of Nazareth. It also echoes the dopey “DaVinci Code” novel by asserting that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, that the couple had a son. They claim the son was named Judah and that all three were buried together.

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich was Tim Russert’s "guest" on “Meet the Press” Sunday, and it’s safe to assume the eloquent Georgian would have preferred something more pleasant for Christmas like a root canal, a colonoscopy, or an income tax audit. In fact, Russert gave Gingrich a grilling that many murder suspects don’t receive from hostile police officers in an interrogation room.

With that as pretext, while you read some of Russert’s inquiries, just imagine how incredibly unlikely it is that any Democrat candidate for president will ever face the kinds of questions Gingrich did this fine day. For instance, can you in your wildest dreams envision Russert asking John Edwards or Hillary Clinton something like this:

NBC anchor Brian Williams didn't exactly strike a tone of toughness with new House Speaker Nancy Pelosi after she was elected, asking her softball questions on NBC Nightly News about what "drain the swamp" meant, and what she would say to the president, and how "history was riding along with her," and what her thoughts were on her family at the historic moment.

But twelve years ago tonight, one week after Newt Gingrich's big win, on November 15, 1994, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw hammered Gingrich in a snide and negative ten-minute "Dateline NBC" hit piece. Brokaw pushed every negative button. Gingrich had a "long streak" of "casually reckless" remarks. He admitted "he smoked pot" and "got a marriage deferment" to avoid service in Vietnam. He went to first wife Jackie's hospital room "the day after her cancer surgery" to discuss divorce terms. He made a "very ominous" charge that FDA chief David Kessler threatened to ruin businesses. And his "well-heeled admirers," called "Newt Incorporated," showed he was already ethically compromised, since voters would think donors "were trying to buy his heart if not his vote, at the least."

From a post of mine at BusinessandMedia.org.

“Food marketing to children is a $10-billion-a-year industry, and some parents’ advocates and lawyers are saying it’s out of control,” noted NBC reporter Stone Phillips as he opened his August 18 story.

To lend scientific authority to these claims, Phillips turned to Harvard psychologist Susan Linn, whom he merely described as “the author of ‘Consuming Kids.’ She says brand names are among toddlers’ first words and logos among the first images they recognize.”

“Kids are requesting brands as soon as they can talk,” Linn told Phillips.

As odd as it sounds that children would say “Cocoa Puffs” before “mommy,” Phillips didn’t question Linn’s assertion. Instead, Phillips went on to show clips of NBC’s Hoda Kotb conducting an experiment with a group of preschoolers and toddlers as she asked them to identify corporate logos.

Even then, Phillips conceded, “they didn’t get” every logo right, even though they “came pretty close.”

But Linn is a dispassionate researcher and neutral scientist, right?

Wrong.

LegalTimes.com has a problem with Alberto Gonzales saying: "It has been estimated that, at any given time, 50,000 predators are on the Internet prowling for children."

Where did it come from? NBC's "Dateline" used it in their reporting of online predators. What's the problem? The source of that number is about as tangible as the black smoke on the TV show "Lost."

Hansen’s source, according to the “Dateline” report: unnamed “law enforcement officials.” Asked who those law enforcement officials were, Hansen told Legal Times that “this is a number that was widely used in law enforcement circles,” though he couldn’t specify by whom or where... “Was it just a WAG — a wild-assed-guess?” he says. “It could have been.”

You can't say Angelina Jolie doesn't think big - with your tax dollars. In an interview aired on this morning's Today show, Jolie advocated applying the No Child Left Behind Program . . . to every child in the world, courtesy the American taxpayer.

Ann Curry, Today newsreader and NBC Dateline host, had interviewed Jolie during her recent trip to Africa to promote education. At one point, Curry made this somewhat surprising observation to the Hollywood star:

"There is another very famous person who talks about education. And you sound a lot like her: Laura Bush."

Jolie engaged in a, no pun intended, pregnant pause and a nervous chuckle. You could hear the gears grinding as she seemingly asked herself 'just how political can I get here?'

NBC's Dateline featured a researcher who makes a controversial claim: Mohammad was not really a proph--

No, that's not the controversial claim the researcher made, although it is just as inflammatory. The one Michael Baigent told to NBC was that Jesus did not die on the cross, a belief that undermines one of the central tenets of Christianity. After NBC Dateline's failed attempt at finding "redneck" NASCAR fans who would persecute fans in Muslim outfits, those at Dateline demonstrate that they themselves have succeeded in persecuting a religion.

Correspondent Sara James reports that Michael Baigent alleges a coverup.

A cover up, he contends, because his clues point to a radical conclusion: that Jesus did not die on the cross.

B. Duane Cross writes at NASCAR.com that NBC was unable to find people in the racing stands who would persecute their "plants" wearing Middle Eastern clothing. Also, the NBC crew did not do a good job of concealing themselves.

NBC News baited the hook, but netted nothing in its "sting" attempt to find anti-Muslim sentiments during the Martinsville race weekend....

The inference is that NASCAR fans are bigots, and NBC News was hoping to bait fans into making insensitive remarks to the Muslim / Arab people it had planted at the track.

Ramsey Poston, NASCAR's managing director of corporate communications, said Wednesday that no instances of unrest were reported. "No one bothered them," Poston said.

Michelle Malkin has updated the story on how NBC is planning to parade obvious Muslims around NASCAR races to see if those hayseeds at the races will demonstrate American discrimination against the Muslim people.

I spoke this afternoon with Ramsey Poston, managing director of corporate communications at NASCAR. He's on his way down to Texas for the NASCAR race this weekend, and he responded to NBC Dateline's undercover Muslim stings, which I first reported on yesterday morning. "This is outrageous for a news organization with the reputation of NBC to stoop to the level of attempting to create news instead of reporting it. Any legitimate journalist should be ashamed."

Michelle Malkin has posted an "apparent Dateline NBC solicitation to Muslim groups." With the comments about the April 1st weekend, perhaps we should hope this is an elaborate April Fools prank. If this is as authentic as John Green's "Bush makes me sick" e-mails, the most enjoyable part is how these anti-discrimination producers want to make sure their professional victims "look Muslim" and have full beards and skull caps, and then send them to a NASCAR race. (Hmm. In fact, since NBC still airs Nextel Cup races, wouldn't it be seriously off-putting to its racing-broadcasting arrangements?)

Let's hope Dateline doesn't try to put the Muslims in exploding GM trucks, since that would be taking the staged segments to a whole new level. Here's how it reads:

As reported on tonight's O'Reilly Factor (January 10, 2006), Sunday's episode of NBC's Dateline (January 8, 2006) declared that recent attacks on the traditional meaning of Christmas were a "giant, laughable lie."

A segment on blogs narrated by Josh Mankiewicz also aired a snippet from Bill O'Reilly's recent appearance on Letterman's Late Show. Which snippet? The part where Letterman told Bill, "I have the feeling about 60 percent of what you say is crap." Real balanced, eh?

From the Dateline segment, as shown on the Factor tonight (available at foxnews.com) (emphasis mine):

MANKIEWICZ (voiceover): "That nutty war on Christmas thing got plenty of traction on the blogs before it ever hit your TV set. Now a lot of bloggers say it's finally been put to bed."

LETTERMAN (snipped from O'Reilly's guest spot): "I have the feeling about 60 percent of what you say is crap." (audience laughter)

At one of those "indy-media" sites the hard Left hosts (and who's leftier than San Francisco?), the socialist "peace" freaks of Code Pink plan to protest Hillary Clinton as she has a comfortable chat with former NBC "Today" and "Dateline" anchor Jane Pauley:

On Saturday January 28th Senator Hillary Clinton of New York will sit down with Jane Pauley at The Bar Association of San Francisco Special Benefit Event at the Masonic Center. While using San Francisco as a backdrop for Clinton's re-election campaign, the event is an opportunity for Bay Area Democrats to dish-out $75.00 - $300.00 to attend at 7:00pm no-host reception followed by an evening of political image makeover chit-chat with Pauley and Clinton.

Shane Bishop, NBC Producer A producer for "Dateline NBC" is apparently collaborating with a convicted killer in order to get a sensational story about another one. The Austin-American Statesman reports:

"Dateline NBC" producer Shane Bishop has a deal for Gov. Rick Perry: Promise to waive the death penalty for an imprisoned Arkansas murderer, and I'll help you solve two murders in the Fort Worth area in 1982 and 1983. The unusual offer came in a Nov. 29 letter from the California-based Bishop to Perry and Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, offering to help solve three cold murder cases in the two states if the chief executives would "guarantee not to pursue the death penalty" against an Arkansas convict serving life without parole for murder.

In a ten-second promo at the end of Friday's NBC Nightly News, an announcer excitedly promised, “Sunday: Joe Wilson, the man at the center of the CIA leak scandal and NBC's got him!” Viewers then saw a short clip of Wilson as he sat across from Campbell Brown: “The White House trained their guns on me.” Back to the announcer with matching text on screen: “The Dateline interview: Sunday 7, 6 Central.” CBS ran its plug for 60 Minutes inside a CBS Evening News story in which John Roberts asserted: "The case started with the outing of a CIA operative, but [prosecutor Peter] Fitzgerald found no crime in that. It didn't sit well with Plame's husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson. In an exclusive interview for Sunday's 60 Minutes, he told Ed Bradley:" CBS played a soundbite of Wilson accusing Karl Rove despite Rove's vindication so far: "After Mr. Rove said about my wife, 'She's fair game,' I would like to see him frog-marched out of the White House. Whether it's in handcuffs or not is immaterial. If it was not illegal, it was certainly, it seems to me, a dubious ethical comportment. And I think we deserve better from our senior public servants."

Video of NBC's promo in Real or Windows Media